


.53 Percent

by Nemonus



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Post-Game
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2018-11-08 04:46:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 7,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11074341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: No matter how far she traveled, some things she always carried with her. An archive of unconnected short fics cross-posted from tumblr. Expect Aloy/Sylens, Varl, and worldbuilding.





	1. A Toast [Aloy/Sylens]

The workshop in the broken mountain is the first place Aloy has had a chance to rest in for a while, and besides, she wants to make Sylens wait.

He doesn’t react while she squeezes water from a fox-skin pouch to the latest ancient vessel she had found. His story hangs awkwardly in the cold air, but he doesn’t show a shred of guilt about it.

She inclines the cup toward him while she considers her response. Silty water slops.

Bad omen that she can’t decide what exactly to accuse him of first, bad omen that the cup has the Faro name on its chipped ceramic, bad omen that Sylens notices and slips one hand over hers to take the cup and drink a cautious sip. He inclines it back.

“To the future.”

Aloy narrows her eyes. “Is that funny to you?”

“No.”

She knows exactly what to say to him now. No amount of penitence can forgive some things.


	2. Airwaves [Aloy/Sylens]

Every society must be founded on justice, Marad said, and as learned as they were the Carja had for so long misinterpreted that word that it had become distorted. This was one of the reasons that kept Aloy in the city, even though the noise outside the apartment kept her startling awake some nights. Meridian gave her tasks, and still shaken from the near end of the world Aloy felt better if she solved some of them.

Stolen heirlooms, contested field lines, soiled water supplies; Aloy met with soldiers and guardsmen in her pursuit of these.

Marad, though, fit neatly at her side as her advisor, and so she was not brought formally under the wing of the guard or the Kestrals. Aloy and Marad looked at one another with the wary respect of sawtooths sharing territory.

One of these cases, then, a dispute settled. (What an astonishing case, really - one woman claiming another’s strider walked into her field. _Her_ strider! This would never have happened during the derangement.) One of those cases like the rest, and afterward Aloy walks along a field beside a clear river fenced in by carefully layered stones and murmurs to her Focus.

“And she said it was her strider. Things have certainly changed … For so long I was the only one who could tame machines.”

“Not the only one.”

She flinches just with her hands, gripping the spear tighter. The spear he gave to her, threaded about with pieces left in the strange dusty dark of the mountain, brings back memories of the one time she felt that she knew anything about him that he hadn’t given her through gritted teeth. He lived in the mountain, she learned that day. He slept somewhere there, the smell of him just barely noticeable in the chill of the snow and the bite of the metal. She’s there and then she’s in the apartment, the night before the attack, wondering whether he was listening.

Those rocks holding the flood back are so astonishingly made.

Aloy stops just before touching her Focus. “…Sylens?”

Nothing. Of course there’s nothing. She looks for a place to sit down, then, angry, strides forward with more certainty.

She mutters, careful of the people pulling up leafy plants from the fields around her. “You choose _now_ to barge in and tell me that I’m wrong about something? Where are you?”

He makes a noise. It’s a hum in the back of his throat and she knows that he made it just so that she knows he’s there but not speaking to her. He is using the time to think. She’s wondering whether she’ll be able to get that sound out of her head.

“You’re doing well,” he finally says. “You don’t need me.”

Most things he says are lies upon truths upon lies, and she has a feeling she only understands one layer of that at the moment.

“Have you heard every time?” Every time she inclines her head toward her Focus, she has been thinking of him. At times she wondered whether he had become a personal cult, her own spirit living in a mountain. At others she was certain she addressed the man, with all his weakness for knowledge without any care for the systems that knowledge described.

“The signal has sometimes been erratic.” He paused. “I consider in my travels how best to let it through.”

“Considerate,” Aloy says. (Scorn disguising care and revealing care at the same time.)

Sylens hums again, a short bark, and she sighs at him and she wonders whether that sound will haunt him too.

She looks out into the fields and her thoughts go back to the strider. When she marches onto the bridge to Meridian her head is clearer, and the silence in her ear is complete.


	3. Trespass [Aloy/Sylens]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ideally there would be a 10,000 word story set before this one, establishing how Aloy and Sylens found some measure of trust. Marad would have done something admirably understated that clearly involved spy shenanigans. I haven't written that story.

Wait at the elevators, Avad had said. You’ll be required to recognize him, to let him past the guards. We do not trust him.

Avad knew how to protect his precarious city. Aloy did not doubt it. But this - she found herself wanting to wait, and not because she did not want Sylens to arrive.

She had been used to only hearing him.

* * *

He stayed in the city.

She wasn’t sure when she had gotten used to him. Sylens, she learned, kept strange hours; he would be out, debating and haggling, until after Aloy had come back from hunting in the evening. He would thunder into the storage cellar that had once been Olin's hidden room and lurk there, moving things around until he had made a library. She would find messages only she could read, Focus signs tagged onto the side of the wall. _Out late. Picked up Avrid’s Stellar Measurements from Jura._ More than once they startled guests (Vanasha, Marad) by continuing out loud a conversation they had been having in notes. She _lived with him_ , she realized very gradually. He used the bathwater after she was done.

She studied the flames in the fireplace upstairs before she went to sleep. Was the apartment hers, yet? She thought of it as Olin’s still. Where did the Spire end? Sometimes Sylens sat on one of Olin's daybeds next to her.

* * *

One of these times, then. The fire was burning down to embers, the city murmuring underneath them. She could read their pasts like data points. 1. Helis. 2. HADES. 3. Almost a year of slow trust and irritation and trust again. 4. This: staring and realizing that they were the only ones who knew so much. 5. Staring, and realizing he was looking back with not loftiness but with a softness around his eyes.

When he kissed her he caught her around the back, almost lifted her up. His mouth was warm but immobile, no more thrilling than the skin of his hands; she thought that either she or he must have done something wrong. It was enough to want to kiss him again, though, and she needed to breathe meanwhile, so the next kiss was open-mouthed and with most of her weight on him. This, then. This was what she had wanted.

His Focus glowed too bright. This close, her eyes narrowed against it. Aloy reached up and unclipped the metal piece from his ear, holding the dimmed glow for a moment. Just before she leaned toward him again, she felt his fingers tangle in her hair as he covered her Focus.  


	4. Refuge [Varl, Sona]

They were building the barricade in the wrong place. The bustle of refugees and the shouting of warriors downed out the rest of Sona’s thoughts, leaving her with just the intent of the tribe: safety, protection, cultural survival on a scale so small that logistics for it had not occurred to her before. Nevertheless, she was pushing stakes into place in front of the one shelter which her warriors could not defend, and they would be backed up against it. To fight like this implied planned desperation.  
  
Teersa had seen Sona hesitate when they had arrived at the mountain. While Lansra and Teersa argued in front of the door, Sona had caught Teersa’s eyes and the war chief had recognized in her a worry kin to her own. Teersa didn’t want to see the Nora slaughtered at the door to All-Mother’s cave, and that was why she would break the taboo. That was why she would allow people inside, turning the mountain into a place of last resort rather than a place into which only the sacred and favored could go. Sona balanced a sapling trunk torn from the front gate against the rock and shifted to her other hand the rope with which she would bind it.  
  
“Feels wrong, doesn’t it?” Someone pushed another stake into place beside her. It took Sona a moment to wrest her gaze away from her work and to realize that the one who had spoken was her son. “Feels like we’re facing the wrong direction.”  
  
Right that he should be the one to echo her worries back, though.  
  
“It does,” she said. Varl tied the next stake beside her, then pulled at his collar. They stood under a slight awning because of the way the temple doors had been built around the rock, but, nevertheless, Sona felt drops of rain. It had started to rain intermittently shortly after the attack, as if the sky sympathized.  
  
Their backs would be against this wall soon. The other half of Sona’s remaining war band was fighting at the base of the hill, buying the Nora time. She heard the distinctive clanking of the corruptors’ swinging arms. Usually in battles she could reassure herself with the thought that she had survived worse, that her people had thrived in worse, but this battle was different. The Nora had never ben driven so fast and so far. The Red Raids were a different beast than this displacement.  
  
“You always had a knack for this,” Sona said.  
  
Varl looked startled for a moment, as if he hadn’t expected the words to be directed at him. He was closest, though, and when she clapped him on the shoulder she saw him understand that she was looking at him, that she was not lying to him or rewriting their history. She had not been an easy mother. She had always believed this, though: that both her children had been canny.    
  
After Sona and Aloy-now-Seeker had driven the invaders out of the Sacred Lands the war-chief had spent long weeks mourning her own daughter. Pride was a rare currency. She hoped Varl knew she gave him his inheritance of it now.  
  
“I try to make Vala proud,” Varl said, his voice thick.  
  
“You’ve done that for me,” Sona said. Their glances away were identical, their second looks the same. Sona would not vow to speak differently to her family after this; they were her family, and they had survived for long generations as warriors who spoke to one another in competitions and wrestling matches, long patrols and tests. As far as she considered it, Varl had already passed his.  
  
After all, there were echoes from inside the mountain. Puffs of warm air like breath circulated out of the cave mouth. The breath of All-Mother would breathe on her boy. She clapped him on the shoulder again, and this time Varl nodded at her, his eyes wide.  
  
They would put their backs to the mountain here. They would fight in the exhalations of it. Footsteps lower on the slope had become as loud as gunfire. Varl moved away, looking toward the horizon as if for rescue, and Sona thought back on how he had known she was thinking of their family.  
  
She would try to make Vala proud too. 


	5. Threshold [Aloy]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 5,000 or so words of HZD later, I actually write a fic about the machines. This drabble also contains the first bit of story I ever jotted down for this game.

Aloy rode one strider from the eastern gate to her first glimpse of the Sundom proper.  
  
When she first left the Sacred Lands, the sky had gone dark so quickly that she felt like she had run into it. It didn’t feel right to hunt for trinkets among the ruins of the old world, but then, the sanctity of the sacred had never applied to Aloy anyway. Exile had been sacred too.  
  
At the base of a tallneck she had driven her spear into the neck of a watcher and stood there, panting, for a moment. She pulled her victory in with one deep breath and then another watcher came at her feet-first.  
  
The cutting curves of metal cycled through the air. Aloy threw herself backward, not graceful, but fast enough that the watcher chassis smashed against the dead watcher’s broken neck instead of bruising her ribs any further. She raised her spear, fumbling with the cords. As cruel as the machine’s feet looked in her terrible up-close glimpse, they stepped delicately through the remains of the watcher’s fallen partner. The long neck swayed.  
  
This time, Aloy knew. She looked around for anything else that might come flying out from her peripheral vision - a watcher, the tallneck, or her strider - and saw the one she had hoped for. The strider stood in the open track with its head down, pawing.  
  
Aloy shouted for the watcher to focus on her. For a moment the two of them shifted back and forth in time with one another, as Aloy wondered who would move first.  
  
Then the strider lowered its head and charged. It picked the watcher up underneath the belly, crushing one leg with just the impact. Parts pinged off the head of the strider as it flung the watcher up, then caught the flailing, twisting body against its armored head again on the way down. Smoke plumed, smelling of hot metal. With both watchers dead it was the strider’s turn to pick its way between the corpses as it turned to see whether any more enemies had approached its back.  
  
She had considered leaving the sparking strider there as a mercy to its tired legs, but she wanted the company.  
  
When Aloy left Daytower days later it was snowing so hard that her first glimpse of the rest of the world was all darkness and dots of white. The strider snorted beneath her, its feet finding careful purchase on the dirt. She did not feel that she knew how to understand the Carja yet. The bickering, prosperous people of Daytower were just a far-flung outpost from the city of Meridian, the one supposedly as close to the cities of the Metal World as anyone could ever be. She imagined it as a shining place, reflective like water. The snow landed on her sleeves and melted, leaving dark spots.  
  
Of course the Carja here had not been like the ones who had conducted the Red Raids. She barely remembered that time, and would need to learn more about the new king to whom the Carja swore their rangy loyalty.  
  
All these new things to learn. She patted the strider as she leaned back into the incline. Maybe she would give the machine a name. If the other option was to starve she would have to kill it for shards. For now, though, she could think of it at least as having the potential to stay with her long enough for a name.


	6. Perimeter [Aloy/Sylens]

“Sit with me.” Sylens looked at Aloy from the top of a gentle slope.

Days rounded like stones in the river, dry orange sunsets at her back; Aloy had traveled long enough to know that Sylens would not meet her in person if that meeting would put him in  danger. Whether borne of coldness or of cowardice, his tendency to protect his own interests and his own pierced skin meant that she could expect to lay down her weapons until she left him to hunt on her own. It was a precarious sort of trust, but since the immediate threat of HADES was no longer hanging over the world, other dangers did not seem so deep.

She knew this place, too. The woods were wild with stalkers around the jungle, but the skeletal machines would leave hunters alone unless one of their beacons was disturbed. Other big machines stayed out of the circle the tallneck walked, compelled by some part of GAIA’s remnant code to give the satellite receiver-transmitter space in which to send out its signal. When she unfolded the overlay of her Focus she could see the purple tracks in the trod-flat ground, the circle the tallneck walked.

Sylens sat at the edge of the path. The tallneck had rounded the corner of the butte in the center of its track, still far enough away that Aloy couldn’t feel the shaking of its footsteps yet. The first time she had seen a tallneck, the strangely wide, flat path alerted her to the presence of something unusual, but the air had felt different too. So high in the air, giving off radio signals and ions, the head of the tallneck stirred the day in a way that felt different from thunderjaw malice or stormbird electricity. 

“This close to the track?” Aloy said. She was not opposed to sitting beside him, but there was neither fun nor pride in making it easy - and why here? “The tallneck will rattle you around.”

The machine approached, its multitude of toes setting down on the dirt just to lift up again with the clicking sound of metal hide brushing together. Dust jumped up from the path. 

“I can see the tracks as well as you can,” Sylens said. “The tallneck is programmed. It is unlikely our presence will hamper its progress.” 

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Aloy sat. She had stood in a similar place the first time she had seen a tallneck. Although she had not been frightened by the way it shook the ground after she saw the majestic machine, she had been keenly aware of its crushing force. So she had circled around again (and startled some watchers) on that first and difficult hunt for the signal at the top of the tallneck's saucer-shaped head. 

Sylens shifted his knee to touch hers. The tallneck put one foot down in front of them, dust prickling in Aloy’s eyes. She watched the bend of the machine’s strange knees, the way the many toes flexed tiny joints against the flattened dirt. Why had GAIA decided that a machine so enormous should have toes like butterflies’ legs? Probably they lent the most efficient support, and were easily fashioned by the tiny hands of the Cauldron factories. 

When the tallneck had heaved its last leg up from in front of Sylens, he gave a deep sigh. Aloy looked at him, still feeling the rumbles of the machine’s passage. 

He met her eyes and waved one hand between them in the direction of the track. “It reassures me that creatures based on the principles of science to not deviate from their course. That tallneck is following a command almost as strong as gravity. GAIA and her brethren have a hold on this world that rivals natural law. There is no danger at all as long as it follows that signal, and our Focuses would have detected a change before our eyes did.”

Aloy shivered, resettled her hands on her knees. This had been dangerous, like most of the things he had gotten her into. Who was _Sylens_ to trust in tallnecks when he had seen the Eclipse turn one on its side and drag its head through the canyons? The tallneck walked, entirely out of sight now behind the wooded cliffside. 

“It’s amazing that GAIA did this,” Aloy said. Sylens, she knew, would agree with this. He would prefer that she had said ‘GAIA’, instead of the Ancient Ones, because it was more accurate. An alien intelligence had made the saurian creature now striding along the other side of the butte, and Aloy and Sylens were the only ones in the world who knew it for what it was. He waved his hand into the purple glow of the track as if stirring water, his eyes thoughtful as he walked the same paths in his mind that she had done. She took his wrist, settled his hand on her knee so that she could hold him palm-to-palm. Waited for the tallneck to walk around once again, creating its perimeter, before she let go.


	7. Imprint [Aloy, Sylens]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After hearing the story of Banukai, Aloy puts some ideas together.

Downhill of the dye spring the ground was warm, and Aloy could camp without the stares of Song’s Edge burning holes in her skin. The shielded armor she had grown comfortable wearing was only as good in the cold as the skins she had made it with; she suspected she had actually pulled out most of the insulating surfaces in an effort to attach the furs, which she had not considered during the prospect of a fight in Meridian but now regretted deeply with the hindsight of a Watcher. She pitched her tent and pulled her goosedown blanket up to her nose when night started to fall.

The sky in the Cut was blue-purple and rich as stories. She had stood, uncomfortable but unwilling to leave, and listened to the tale of Banukai as it was told in Song’s Edge.

“She came out of a cradle facility,” Aloy muttered to Sylens. “She would have been one of the first.”

Not alone like Aloy; Banukai would have lead a group out of their shelter, or followed in the crowd until she grew curious and brave.

Neither the sky nor the Focus answered, but her travels with Sylens included what she thought spiritual faith might feel like: he would answer when he thought the time was right.

* * *

Weeks later she was exploring, more furs layered over her cold armor and her spear in her hand ready to pry bluegleam from corpses. She found another painting at a crossroads, this one beside a path so steep she imagined it might lead to the impassible canyons around Ban-Ur itself. The woman in the painting had been drawn with a murky outline like a ghost, gray and blue clouding into the boulder on which she had been portrayed. Her face and clothing were detailed, though: sharp brown eyes looking over the valley, black hair tightly woven in lines like the gardens of the maizelands, and a plain blue-black tunic, more like Elizabet Sobeck’s than any Aloy had seen among the Banuk of the Cut.

Aloy looked for a while, trying to picture the outline of a door in the rock behind her.

Sylens said, “You were right.”

Aloy thought about what it might have been like to walk out of the mountain as an adult, but could not add other people in her mental painting, no matter how intently she stared at the rock. Banukai, her grief insisted, had also been born alone.

“I know,” Aloy said.


	8. Orphan [Aloy, Nakoa]

The strider was limping. Yellow sparks showered onto Aloy’s leg, bouncing off her goatskin jacket. The path looked so much longer than it had before the fight. With a working strider, this was a stroll through the Embrace. With _this_ strider, this loyal wounded creature, the walk stretched on unending into the evening. The first strider she had ever ridden had gone with Aloy from one side of the Embrace to the other, its low sounds and many bright lights friendlier than most of the people she had ever known.

Yellow flowers waved on the top of the rise. Trudging over, Aloy saw a person standing in the long grass on the other side. She froze. When she rode a strider, people usually saw _her_ first, riding tall. Now, hidden as she was behind the machine’s shoulder, they might have seen what looked like a dangerous machine and nocked an arrow already.

This particular hunter allowed her caution to rule her. She leaned around to see the other side of the strider, recognizing Aloy at the same time as Aloy recognized Nakoa.

“Aloy! I thought you left to find the Sundom. Did you capture this strider?” Nakoa swung her bow onto her back, but remained wary.

“An errand brought me back, but a couple watchers caught us on the other side of the hill, and …” Aloy looked down at the burnt-black craters on the strider’s leg. “It’s hurt.”

Nakoa edged around the strider, curious.

Aloy was still not entirely comfortable talking to people other than Rost, although Vala and Varl had made it easy enough. Villagers could not be expected to respond to her with anything other than criticism, and she preferred to avoid having to intimidate anyone away. She made an effort for Nakoa, though, even as the words felt uncomfortable in her mouth. “This strider won’t hurt you. I tamed it, but it can’t fight now. Maybe you could keep it for a while, let it rest?”

“Will it rest like an animal?” Nakoa moved closer. Aloy stepped aside so that she could see the strider’s leg. “It can’t lick its own wounds...”

Aloy tipped her head. “I don’t know.” She hadn’t considered it. Did machines’ self-preservation extend to repairing one another? She did not know any stories of anyone who had followed a herd close enough to know, but surely someone had. Hunters needed to know their prey. (Something else Rost had taught her, that she wished she could ask him more about now. Did striders have fathers? Did striders have mothers to lead them?)

Nakoa looked close into her face. “I can tell it means a lot to you.” She moved from Aloy’s gaze to the strider’s, hesitantly reaching out to touch the machine’s face. “I’ll let it stay here for a while, anyway.”

“Thank you,” Aloy said.

“If you bring me any more, I’ll make a whole herd.” Nakoa’s small smile was awkward, and Aloy recognized that it matched her own. She was still learning how to do it.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Aloy said, and left them quicker than she had arrived.

(By the time she returned to the Embrace she had learned to repair striders on her own, had become familiar with the metal ligaments and veins that had been torn. She could have saved her first strider if she had known, and the memory of it was a dull ache behind a fiercer cut: she could have saved Nakoa, too.)


	9. Fog Over Distant Mountains [Aloy/Varl]

Varl asked to come along with her, asked it with wide eyes and the sort of suggestion Aloy was beginning to understand. Rost had been more direct, but Varl said “I would like to understand what you see when you look at the world,” and Aloy had been filled, as if with breath, with the urge to walk with him a while.

It was not the first time she had visited the broken bridge beyond Devil’s Thirst, but she had not walked out this far before. She had been distracted instead by exploring in the ruins and sneaking around watchers. Now they passed the bridge and the tall plant life in the shadows underneath, and walked onto the shore where the rounded stones pressed into the soles of their shoes. Aloy scanned the still water, grimacing when she saw the silhouettes of heavily armored snapmaws out near an island. She wouldn’t be able to scavenge parts or fuels from those, not by far; even thinking about it made her feel as if she was drowning in churning water.

“The water rose here,” Varl said calmly. “Look at the roots of the trees. They aren’t supposed to grow like that. But they’re still alive.”

Aloy looked at him. _Your sister was beautiful and you are beautiful,_ but how was she supposed to say that?

“Weird,” she said.

“Weird,” Varl agreed emphatically.

They walked along the shore and inland again, into the shadow of the metal towers.

“The All-Mother must have protected the Old Ones, for a time,” Varl said. “She wouldn’t have let this happen to their cities if it weren’t for the Metal Devil.”

He knelt down to look at a twisted, rusted I-beam. Aloy stared at his back. Why had Rost’s teachings never sunk into Aloy the way the matriarchs’ had sunk into Rost and Varl? The name of All-Mother felt so thin and false in Aloy’s ears. She hadn’t grown up with as many stories as Varl had, but she was missing some other element of faith, too.

Maybe finding her own mother would help her discover a better faith, one that did not send its children to be outcasts. Could she find some sort of faith in the ruins themselves, some lesson there? The Old Ones’ way of life had died, but something of it was still preserved here. The metal of this bridge was layered so thick that it would not crumble away even after plants had grown over its entire surface. Once, the bridge might have held an open space as large as Mother’s Heart. The bridge had passed through at least one of the towers, if Aloy understood the way the pieces fit together correctly. It had been a marvel, and even so many years later, it was still here. The Nora didn’t fight over it, but in a way, that made the land all the more desirable. It just persisted, as outcast as Aloy, as lush as Varl.

When he stood up, she stepped closer. He didn’t startle, but there was surprise in his eyes.

“Thank you,” she said.

He laughed nervously. “I am not usually thanked so straightforwardly. Bravery is the least that is required of us.”

She was taken aback for a moment, aware that she was walking a fraying line between Nora pride and Sona’s cold manner of showing affection to her only son. Only thing to do when she fell was to grab the first bit of solid ground she could find, though, so she touched Varl’s arm and patted it in what she hoped was a sisterly fashion.

(Later, she would regret this, thinking that she had not in fact wanted to appear sisterly at all. It was the only type of affection she had ever learned, though the sort of brusque kind shared by her and Rost or Varl and Vala. But she had more to learn, and he understood.)

He patted her arm back, less awkward and more accepting. She was not an exile to him. They walked comfortably together, back and forth along the yellow line drawn across the road like a chalk blaze on the face of a wayward child.


	10. Cavalry [Sylens]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's [HZD week!](https://dailyhorizon.tumblr.com/post/167661572988/horizon-zero-dawns-1-year-anniversary-is-steadily)

The shape of the horizon had changed for Sylens one day.

Afterward, he had climbed to the top of a vine-strewn cliff and sat knee-deep in wet foliage to sight across to the horizon and try to see the curve of the Earth. The temptation to continue his research was strong, but he could feel the exhaustion coming and the most recent lesson sitting like fermentation in his gut. HADES did not put its lessons in order from most basic to most complex, did not make its teachings easy. Sylens knew the basics of mnemonics from the Banuk, and the people who had given HADES its information had not programmed it for oral history. Instead, there were so many lists, so many ways to reference and organize. Sylens had chosen one which he felt had been most relevant to him: geography was immediate and necessary. Images scrolled across the holographic projection in rainbow colors.

He had been drunk on the curvature of the Earth once, and when he had spoken to her about it, Aloy had not understood —

The feeling came back as he sized up the Ravagers. Unlike the day at the Eclipse camp, there was nothing here to obscure lines of sight. Two Ravagers stalked smoothly across the plains, trailed by the slight scraping sound as metal pieces moved together. A third Ravager found another in its path and adjusted slightly, opening its mouth to reveal flashing lights and the white edges of sharp metal teeth. The most difficult part of this hunt would be to lure and override multiple Ravagers at once, keeping them from attacking one another. 

He began to set the traps.

Seconds after he activated the lure, two Ravagers walked into the electrical traps quite naturally. Twice Sylens saw confusion on the machine faces and recognized it as false anthropomorphism, the same instinct that drove people to invent Sun gods. He overrode both in quick succession, the module spitting blue sparks.

The third Ravager heard the attack coming.

Clattering and snuffling, the wild machine crested the hill right behind Sylens just as the second overridden Ravager was raising its head. Both curved around him, sword-cuts in the hot air. Breath soured in his throat; it was so _easy_ to imagine the weight of both machines coming down on him, the ooze of blood. 

The blue-veined Ravager rolled over on its back and stabbed its bladed foot under the wild Ravager’s jaw. Turning around dug the claws even further in. Sylens clutched his lance to his chest. If he stepped back to get out of the way, he was just as likely to be swiped by a flailing leg — 

He pressed the override against the wild Ravager’s shuddering near leg.

The blue Ravager opened its mouth, readjusted to bite down again. Sylens threw himself against the leg on his left, trying to force the two of them apart. If this didn’t work he would lose both of them, lose Aloy’s Focus, and that fool Helis would have another interchangeable sacrifice in front of people who had no idea what they were watching die — 

The wild Ravager stood frozen under the override signal. Sylens jammed the blunt end of the lance into the ground without breaking the signal, and threw all his weight into pushing the tame Ravager back. 

Strength wouldn’t make the difference; the only thing that kept the Ravager from falling onto him was the signal his Focus emitted. He trusted that signal, though, had known it long enough that he could wave his hands in front of the tame Ravager’s mouth, as high as he could go. The machine would be seeing just the outline of him, just the digital fencing that held it prisoner. Sylens waved again, creating a perimeter.

If this had been a tale he would have stared the Ravager down. Instead he was keenly aware of the ridiculousness of his waving, of the way his left leg was dragging as he tried to keep some part of his body within grabbing distance of the lance. If the wild Ravager didn’t quiet down in time, this plan would collapse —

The noise behind him, both the growl and the high whine of the override, subsided. 

Sylens drew in a deep breath while the Ravager in front of him shifted from foot to foot like a nervous child. The second tame Ravager — third now, he supposed — was pacing somewhere further down the hill, identifiable by its churning footsteps.

He took a chance, glanced behind him at the machine. It stood calm, looking back and forth slightly.

Sylens sat down in the grass between the Ravagers before reaching blindly behind him to grab the lance. Shock, probably, he thought, breath heaving. He just needed to sit for a second. That’s enough. Still alive. Time to go. 

 


	11. Thief [Ourea, Sylens]

Ourea noticed the young man before he noticed her. There was a certain willowy anxiety many of the apprentices shared, their anticipation making them flighty even if they weren’t ready for their trials yet. The conclave reminded them of who they might one day become, and of the blue light which they could never truly touch. She understood this feeling, and so she scuffed her feet as she approached to make sure that the acolyte heard her.

When they conversed he spoke with an intensity of understanding that impressed her. His answers were correct but lacked imagination. Usually, apprentices as smart as this began developing theories they thought were new. Sylens of Owl’s Watch did not promote the superiority of his own theses, a gap which Ourea found suspicious. Young men were not, generally, quiet about their own accomplishments.

She thought later that she should have been more suspicious than impressed. She had wanted to find a student to whom she did not have to devote a lot of thought, one who seemed to give her the chance to consider her own connection to the blue light instead of trying to eclipse her shine. Sylens had given her exactly what she expected and hoped to see.

Comparing recollections with others later, she found her memories touched by rumor. Other people said they had seen a man with ice-white eyes, or an acolyte for whom the surgery didn’t take, leaving him with bloody wounds and wires dangling from his skin. Ourea wondered whether she had been wrong about her first impression, but later reconsidered. The acolyte had been keeping a secret, and he had not been subtle enough to conceal the gaps it left behind.


	12. Royal Family [AU: Vala, Varl, Sona]

“We have been invited for an audience with the king,” Sona said skeptically.

Vala studied her mother’s expression. Their family mark had been scrubbed from Vala’s cheek after she had fallen from the mountain. She had been sent with Aloy as a Seeker, the new mark guiding her outside the gates. She folded her arms, thinking back to the half-insult and half-honor. Seeing the Nora from the outside had been a long and baffling journey for both her and Aloy. They had traveled together with joy and trial until Aloy’s travels had sent her to Eclipse hideaways too dangerous for a woman without the technological assistance of the Focus. Vala had returned to the Nora to help her brother drive raiders out of the eastern shores, until darkness had come to the Mountain again and Aloy had called her people to the country of the Sun.

“He can keep his pleas,” Sona said. “We did our work.”

Sona looked to Vala for confirmation, though, and the younger woman felt vindicated by the weight Sona gave her decision. Varl had folded his arms in imitation of her, looking out toward the wreckage of the elevator crawling up the hill.

“Why not?” Vala said. “The offer was given sincerely. They would not try to trap people who just helped them survive.

Sona looked behind her. Did she think the death machines were not truly defeated, even though Varl had been there when Aloy had completed her task? Sona had always been this way, looking over the hill for the next danger. Varl had grown up stern and serious because of it.Vala had grown up pulling the familial bonds as far as they could go, never breaking them. She knew that her mother would listen to her advice.

“We don’t need the blessing of the Carja,” Sona said.

“And we will not receive it.” Vala smiled as she looked up at the red walls. The battle had left the world feeling shimmery and vivid, the red rocks bright and the peaked roofs beautiful and strange. “They would not be so condescending after the war. I want to see the arches above the streets. I want to see the carved stones.”

“Aloy says the king will not expect anything from us,” Varl said.

He had said the right thing. Sona, for some reason of history or personality, had thought the Carja king would expect payment instead of giving them a reward.

“One meeting,” Sona said. “So that Vala can see the arches.”

Vala cheered. It was hard to hear over the sound of the repairs going on; Aloy was somewhere in the wreckage of the village. The sound of it would have sobered her, but she was already sober; Sona would not mistake her daughter’s celebration for a lack of acknowledgement of the respect that had passed between them. Vala had made a diplomatic decision for the Nora, and Sona knew that she could expect her to make more.


	13. Tide Coming In [Elizabet]

_Where were you when the last wave lapped over what was left of Madagascar? Where were you, Ted?_

Elizabet lifted one foot and placed it front of the other. Black dust puffed up from under the soles of her armored boot. She wanted there to be a last shoot somewhere, wanted it so badly that she knew her mind was stretching uncomfortably to try to see greenery that was not present. GPS, of all things, was working fine. She laughed bitterly, then regretted consuming the extra oxygen. She would be able to find her way home, even though the Earth was as featureless as if life had never existed.

GAIA will make it all worth it, she thought with each footstep. She herself had done her part, although it might very well prove just to be a footnote in a forgotten bit of history if GAIA did not. If any one of the many systems failed, there would be no one left to read any of it, footnotes or years and years of text.

Were humans fundamentally resilient? Was consciousness the one thing that defied entropy?

It didn’t seem to be.

She refused to walk under the remains of the gate with such bitterness. One more breath rich with the canned oxygen, the air that had circulated through the Alpha site for months picking up Samina’s frustrated brilliance and Travis’ mutilated hymns, and Elizabet Sobeck walked under the gate onto the driveway to the ranch.

She turned the necklace over and over in her gloved hand. Remember, the Earth had looked this way? Remember? Whose children was she asking? Whose future was she seeing, as blurry and gray as a Faro sunset — that dead ambition had even blotted out the sun. The Earth used to look like this, she wanted to scream. It used to be green and blue instead of oil-slick silver and black. Her thoughts became a string of curses for a while. Was this the right way to die? Had there ever been a right way?

Yes. She sat down, her elbows on her knees. The house was still standing, so she fixed her eyes on the front door and felt some inherent happiness in it fill the tiny space left for hope in her lungs.

There were better last thoughts to choose.

The oxygen meter was beginning to turn yellow. Elizabet blinked the warnings to the side. Let’s look at the horizon instead. _Think of the solid ground, GAIA’s hibernating seeds, instead of the polluted seas._

Let’s try this instead.

_It has to be worth it._ Make it _worth it, Elizabet. GAIA._ Make it _worth it._


	14. Amber [Aloy]

The records had not decayed. Aloy knew how to access each file according to its timestamp, scrolling through them with a careful precision she found comforting. She watched Elizabet lean over the desk and talk to GAIA, both desk and artificial intelligence invisible to the Focus’ carefully chosen sight. The fact that time never passed for this Elizabet had become a matter of great anxiety and fascination for Aloy. The strangeness wasn’t because the image was moving, she knew. She grew up with the Focus; it had lost its magic. The _time_ sent her mind wandering, fancies conjured up like childhood creatures birthed from the black wilderness behind the house where she grew up.

Aloy lay on her back in the grass outside Meridian and tilted her head so that the image of Elizabet reached down toward her. Lower the sound so that she could hear the buzz of insects and the wind through the corn stalks as well as of her mother’s voice, dial up the color so that the purple-pink hologram looked more solid. Pretend Elizabet was talking to her, because in a way, she was. She spoke through the years and her answer was in the grass under Aloy’s shoulders, the bumps in the hillside.

Aloy reached up to embrace the shadow of Elizabet, pretending that she was lacing her own hands together behind her mother’s short hair.

“We should go say hello to Rost,” Aloy muttered. She had introduced them before, had told Rost about what she had discovered. There was something sacred in the chance to speak her father’s name in front of her mother.

“As sacred as it gets.” Aloy was almost certain that Elizabet would respect both her scoffing and the fact that she chose to do it out of earshot of anyone it might hurt.

“Now I’m talking to myself.”

Aloy whistled and closed the hologram, lingering for a moment on the place where her mother’s face had floated. Elizabet was beautiful not because of her appearance but because of the deep heart-aching meaning of who she had been to Aloy and to the world —

Aloy’s strider ambled over the hill. She watched it walk slightly past her before catching a handhold on its side and letting the robot pull her to her feet. Sunlight through leaves dappled the grass. Aloy pulled herself onto the strider’s back and went limp into the saddle, leaning on the strider’s neck and wrapping her arms as far as the would go around it. Without direction the machine ambled for a few more steps before looking back and forth, waiting for direction. The cords were not comfortable under her arms, did not embrace her as the grassy slope had. She could embrace it back, though, under no impression that GAIA’s network would feel her weight or her hands as she patted the bottom of the strider’s neck, under no impression that the gestures meant any less.


End file.
